Month: October 2017

I’m an early adapter. I love technology and I embrace it. A long time ago, I lived in Clayton County and I was the first person in the neighborhood to get DSL. I couldn’t wait. I was breathing down Bell South’s neck, which is now AT&T.

You need the proper tools to evaluate technology. What this podcast will be about is how to design your own development map. I’ll give you an example. I use Ribbon for one run. Understand, when you see me put new stuff up, I’m testing to see how it works and if there are bugs.

You need the proper guidelines on how to do that. If you are a reseller, you should work more on marketing, Facebook integration, blogging, and whatever you can do to sell your products. Resale is very simple in terms of payment processing. You have your merchant account. You have Square for physical transactions. You have PayPal. All that stuff is there. A traditional merchant account is even safer. There are a lot of tools out there that will enable you to collect money for services and goods sold. So, getting paid is not a problem.

The biggest problem as a reseller is how to sell your stuff as fast as possible. Ribbon and Gumroad are not really going to help you with that. I get excited by new and shiny technology, but if you’re a reseller that’s not going to help you that much. As a reseller, you should be looking at how to improve efficiencies, build infrastructure and market because you buy stuff at a discount and sell it at a premium which gives you margin.

One of the reasons I know longer embrace the reseller model is it is under siege. You can still make a lot of scratch as a reseller. Don’t mistake me for saying it’s dead. It’s never going to die. It’s just going to become more and more challenging to make money. It’s puts you in the position where you are trading time for money. It can make a lot of money, and also reselling is fun.

Let’s talk about you. Let’s talk about developing your business development map. Those people that know how to connect online and offline will have a huge advantage in life and business. A virtual classroom is what I want to do. It’s coming.

Be learning how to greet people and how to talk to your friends and family, it helps your business. I do believe you can do business with friends and family. It is not always ideal. If something funky happens, someone has to power down.

You have to figure out you. Everybody doesn’t have the same level of motivation. Everybody does not want a big company. People are in different buckets.

I am a content creator at my core. I’m a mentor, trainer and teacher. That’s 90% of what I do. The other 10% is reselling. I do it because it is fun, but it is not my main gig.

The resale game has changed. You have to do far more to make the same money I was making my first year. There are more people in it now because of the economy. There are a lot of people with degrees who are hustling now because this disruptive nation we live in is no joke.

Let’s go back to the development map and figuring out what you want to do. Let’s say you are a parent and you have a spouse and you have 2.2 kids and one is still in the oven. Let’s talk about the challenges of that and creating your new business development map. If you’re making about $50K, after paying for childcare costs, living expenses, and taxes, it makes more sense for you to stay at home with the kids and save that childcare money while you build a part-time business or work a part-time job. Childcare costs alone are about $1000 a month. Taxes are about $18K on a $50K salary.

When you create your business development map based on your real life and the things you have and where you want to go, you’re going to have a better map. This works better than the “Get Money Hustler’s” arbitrary plan where they only focus on getting money without any rhyme or reason or strategic plan. When you go through that planning process with your spouse about what you want to do, you can come up with a better plan, taking into account what’s best for the entire family.

This brings me to my second point. You can’t flake out when you are building your business development map and have an experience that is not what you desire. You have to say, okay this didn’t work out so we’re going to have to move on to something else.

With this family scenario of 2.2 children, you want to shoot for $20K. The thing is, you’ll be able to double that by developing efficiency in your business. So, you can have a parent home with the kids making $40K to $50K per year. It’s a totally different ballgame at that point. Since this person owns a business, they also have a lot of tax breaks.

In the beginning, it’s going to take some time and effort. It won’t be easy. That’s just the way it is.

You have to get in the game and keep your ear to the ground about new technology developments. There are people today who make a living writing for Kindle for example who could have never done that a few years ago. New advancements in this disruptive economy will bring many opportunities to flourish.

For your development map, you need income goals. Decide on exactly what you want in terms of a house and cars. Shop around and decide on specifics. Do you want a two-car garage? What neighborhood do you want to live in? Get accurate numbers and put that on your development map. After you do this exercise, start basing your income goals on what you want.

Write down your life goals. If you want to get married put that on the sheet. Put down the type of person you want to marry. If you plan on having kids. Put that on the sheet.

By writing things down, you dramatically increase your odds of getting it. In my life, I get what I write down nine times out of ten. That’s why it is so important to go through this process and write it down if you are serious about making it come true in your life.

That’s what you have to do to put together your business development map. As new technology is developed you can evaluate it to see if it fits for your business. Since you already had a roadmap, it is easier to make decisions about which technology and advances to adopt.

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Today we are going to talk about business models. There are so many ways to make money online. This creates a big problem for many people who are trying to create an online business. If you are confused, you are not going to do anything. Confusion equates to being paralyzed for many people. If you are not really dialed into what you want to do, you could seriously waste a lot of time.

Let’s talk about why people struggle. Everyone is on that path of becoming a specialist. You have people doing Facebook funnels. You have people who do Instagram. You have people who are Twitter specialist. This is the thing with social media, without a good backend, it doesn’t matter how much attention you get.

With the changing landscape of the internet, you have a bunch of people who are trying to get in on what doesn’t exist. I’ve talked to a lot of people who said Twitter didn’t matter. Instagram, if you sell a physical product or you’re really good with imagery, it’s still a winner, Somebody just sent me an email saying they’d promote me on their Instagram. I may do it and may not. That’s an “iffy” business model. If you have an Instagram account, you can only do so many promotions.

Instagram is still good. These things are influencer models. Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook where you build these huge followings and then go to sponsors to run ad as a way to make money. Part of that is getting harder and harder. Everyone is trying to go to what I call passive income business models where you don’t do much but you continue to make money over and over again.

I can tell you as someone who has made passive income, it I hard to keep and maintain as it always keeps changing on you. Whereas earned active income is so much more reliable. Part of it is, many people just don’t understand how many ways there are to make money online. There are hundreds of ways to make money online.

You can make money with niche websites or Etsy, making things to sell online or taking surveys. People make $5 here and $50 here. It’s cool if you can get it, but it’s not the same as making enough money or livable income. Even if you have a million subscribers, it doesn’t frequently lead to livable income in most cities. In my opinion, $4K to $5K a month is livable income in most places.

What you hear from all the smart minds is you don’t do shit. People suggest you go out and get VAs. Typically, I hire people, because I am more comfortable with that. I need some face time. I need to connect.

If you’re going to scale up, you’re going to have to hire some real people. I’m talking about real salaries. Outsourcing before you develop core competency is a bad idea is a bad idea. That’s why a lot of people are struggling.

This is the number one reason why so many people do not make a lot of money online. There is this false assumption that it is going to be easier than it is. If you’re going to make real money online, legitimately, you’re going to work your ass off. You can probably do $60K to $100K, you can do that. But once you start scaling up, that’s not going to be the case.

Everybody is moving towards what is hot. The big thing right now is internet marketing. Anyone who is half way decent with Facebook ads can make a great living. I know this guy who has five clients and each client pays him about $10K a month.

There are hundreds of ways to make money. But you have to commit to something. A lot of people can’t make up their mind and are always chasing the latest new thing.

A lot of people use systems. People like to use systems. The ability to use these systems is going lessen because the information will leak out over Facebook groups and stuff.

You have to start with what you have and build. When building an audience sometimes you have to take it on the chin in the beginning, financially. But, without getting a start, there is no middle. It takes time. Sometimes you have to spend money to build your audience. You may have to spring for lunch or breakfast. People think it will be so much faster than it really is.

You’ve got to have an email list. It’s the only thing you own online. That’s pretty much it.

If you go ahead and take a year and create a meetup.com group, and make it very different than other meetup groups, it will grow like crazy. But, it’s like running a business. It’s very much like running a business. Audience building is really important.

I see a lot of people recommending that people build disposable business models. These models are based on following trends. Don’t get me wrong, you can make a lot of money doing that. But, when that trend is over, what are you going to do? You are always in that mode of hunting for the next big thing.

Compare that to building a brand, which is slower. When you build a brand, you build authority in a certain area. Even though it takes longer to pay off, when it does pay off, you no longer have to keep reinventing yourself. You don’t have to keep chasing these hot products.

One of the things I believe is that if you’re creative you’re in good shape. As long as you can sell some stuff and solve problems, you won’t be outsourced. In maybe 50 years, that could change.

It is easy for folks online to get scammed. They often look for quick profits instead of substance. They fall for flashy images and hustler porn.

Without traffic, nothing will sell online. People often give up. It is easier to sell a shitty product with traffic, than to sell the best product without proper marketing.

Learning sales tips and how to market is the main way to succeed online. A beautiful website with no traffic is not going to help you sell much. I made a lot of money with my Urban Pack Rat website and it was not professionally done, but it had a lot of traffic.

If you integrate what you like to do with making money, you won’t need to take off. You won’t need or want a lot of vacation time. There is no reason to run from it. If you predicate your life and money on doing what you like, you don’t need to decompress.

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Right now, we are in the midst of a huge, huge economic shift. In the late 90s when things were going seriously sideways for me, I had to either hustle or perish. During this time period, there were people doing amazingly well. I just wasn’t one of them. My problem was I didn’t have skill sets.

I was talking to this friend of mine in a diner and I said the value of a college education is seriously in question and she said she told her daughter told that she would not pay for college if she didn’t know what the hell she wanted to do. So, it’s not just me that is questioning college degrees. The world’s changed. This is part of that economic shift.

There’s a lot of talk about the great economic collapse. There’s talk about the debt ceiling. Understand, that’s never going to be paid off. That’s part of the grand plan. When JFK put the country back on the silver standard, six months later, he was dead. The economic things that are taking place right now were put into play decades ago.

Real wages have dropped. You’re more educated than you’ve ever been. You have more experience. It looks like you have more money proportionately than your parents, but realistically, you have less spending power. Think about that.

Your parents probably had one wage earner, paid for a house, put money away for retirement and still had money to pay for their kid’s college. That was before taxes got so high. You’re struggling even though you make more money than dear old dad did back in the day. Why doesn’t it add up?

People have graduate degrees and make $80,000 a year, but they don’t have two nickels to rub together? Why? Because people have been conditioned to spend everything they make. That’s social conditioning that is part of the economic shift.

If you’re not paying attention and looking at how things really are, it’s going to be very hard for people to protect themselves and their family, and have the life they want. If you know what’s going on, you can protect yourself. Even though a lot of people are caught up in this, you don’t have to be.

Part of this shift is that we’re moving towards knowledge work. Physical labor jobs and servers and anything that is not highly technical is being eliminated or greatly reduced. There are still occupations that need hands on stuff and they’ll be around for a while. But these opportunities are limited. There are still a few physical jobs left, but not that many.

Everything is being disrupted by this economic shift. Once I started looking at the world that it is, instead of the way I thought it should be, my life changed. I stopped getting pissed off and I started connecting the dots. As long as you are saying, the world should be this way or that way, you can’t really get a firm grasp of what’s going on.

With this big economic shift, there will be a group of people living the life. They will work from home. They will make millions per month. They’ll do whatever they want. They will have compounds. You have some of that right now.

You’ll have another group of people who are functionally poor. They may or may not have a degree. They’ll have a car and a house, but they won’t have freedom or happiness. They will always have this ache, that there is more. They will always feel like they are missing out. They feel that so many things that should happen aren’t happening.

A lot of people are talking about the economic collapse. We have a large number of people who are already in the economic collapse.

Understand, there will always be a lot of low paying service jobs for clerks and waitresses where somebody had to talk to a person or serve them. You might need two or three of those jobs to make a living. These jobs will be arduous and low paying with poor benefits, if any.

The big thing now is everybody says they want to be an entrepreneur. When I was a kid, entrepreneur was a dirty word. When I started being an entrepreneur, it was a dirty word. Today, hustler is a dirty word. Mark my words, it won’t be a dirty word in a few years. It’s going to be a sign of respect.

I don’t get caught up in other people’s reality when I have the ability to create my own. Many people try to superimpose their reality on you. If you allow someone to impose their reality on you when you have the ability to create your own, you’re Boo Boo the fool. You have all the power and ability to create your own reality.

If you aren’t preparing for this economic shift and if you’re not prepared, you’re going to get thrown into that category where you have to hustle. That may put you at a disadvantage, depending on the person you are. There are some people who perform well under pressure, and some people wilt like grapes on a vine on a very hot summer day.

The sooner you start conditioning your mind for this new shift, the better off you’re going to be. I have to be careful stating my opinion. Whenever you’re in the matrix and someone is trying to pull you out, that’s threatening. Once you unhook from the matrix, you are floating in a very strange and scary place. It’s new and unusual and it’s scary.

It’s hard to unhook. I did not unhook. I had my shit snapped off. I got laid off three times in 18 months. Then I never went back to the way I used to think.

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Today we are going to talk about how to stop being poor in America and other places. There are a few things you need to change before you can move forward. Mindset is huge. There are online businesses and physical businesses. There are service businesses and consulting businesses and there are professional services. All of these business models require different fuel to grow.

People are gassed up on making big money really quickly without working that hard. That’s just not reasonable or normal. It’s not going to happen for most people. There will be superstars and unicorns who will do it. If making big money fast was the norm, then why are 70% of people in the USA poor or just barely getting by. Think about that.

Let’s take some common facts. How many people do you know are broke in your personal space? How many people do you know are barely making it? Sometimes they tell you or you just know. Like, maybe their car was broken and they couldn’t drive for a week or two until they got the money together? How many people do you know that complain about a lot of monetary issues? Just consider folks you know and multiply that across the country.

It is easy to get an extra $500 a month with a side hustle. Making an extra $2000 is doable. If you do the work, you’ll get the results. There are people who will go from $0 to $10K a month. I am not going to urge you to quit your job before you are ready. The only time you should quit your job is when your job is costing you money from your business. That is when you should quit your job and not a moment before.

Making money is really simple. Find something that people will pay you for and do it over and over again. The concept is very simple. The execution is a bitch.

We’re going to talk a lot about expectations. If you feel you’re going to start a money-making program and make money real quick and it doesn’t happen in that timeframe, you’re out. What I want to encourage you to do is to extend your timeframes. Once you do that, you’re going to give yourself a better chance for success.

I mean, extend it times three. If you start something today and three years from now it is doing an extra $10K per month, how does that hurt you? The thing is, the time is going to pass. There is this lady I used to visit when I was a kid, her name was Sally Mae Jones. She would say, “If you live long enough, you’re going to get old.”

Whether you’re doing something in the next two years to improve your life, those years are going to come and pass. So, you could be sitting there waiting for the quick opportunity or you can get busy with reality.

Let’s talk about being poor. What is poor? I’m going to give you my definition of poor. It may be different than yours. Poor is when you have to wait to get paid to do something. That’s poor. Some people who earn six figures are poor because of bad money management. Poor doesn’t necessarily mean you have a low income. Poor means you have bad money management skills.

For example, if you make $5 an hour and realize you make $5 an hour and you live like you make $5 an hour, you would have savings and get another job. So that’s poor, if you have to wait to get paid to do something. Once you get past poor to financially solvent, if your car breaks down, you don’t have to wait to get paid to take care of life events that will happen.

I encourage everyone to set up a savings account. That is your attitude money. That is the money you need to prevent circumstances from interrupting your life path.

Another thing you need to escape being poor is to have goals. Goals work very well. The goals must be written down. If you write something down that you want and it scares you, a lot is happening. Number 1 – you don’t think you can get it. You are already scared of the disappointment that will occur if you work hard and don’t get it. So, in your mind, the safe play is not to do anything which is really, really wrong.

The savings account is critical. Once you get $2K to $10K, you don’t have to save anymore. Just think of your savings account as an expense account for your life. You set up your first savings account of $2K to $10K, then you have another account that is your monthly operating account that you use to pay your bills at the first of the month. This prevents stress. This is one of the reasons you have to learn how to manage money.

Another bad thing about being poor is you have consistent stress. You are constantly saying, “If I do this, I can’t do that.” So, you are always making these high-level decisions based on your lack of money management skills, lack of a savings account and lack of a monthly operating account. These things can be done at any income level. One of the first things you need to do is increase your income.

Resale is a fast way to increase your income. Craigsllist is a very fast way to increase your income. YouTube is not a fast way to increase your income. YouTube is a long-term play taking anywhere from six months to three years. Instagram being properly deployed could be fast money. It’s still in the six months to one-year range.

The fastest thing you can do is usually something local, providing a service or providing consulting services or something like that. I have a question for you to ask yourself. Think about it before you answer. Who here thinks they can generate enough good will in the world that they can make a million dollars in one year? Then answer why you feel that way.

Here’s the deal about escaping being poor. There are paths. You have to get yourself on a path that’s good for you. That’s one of the first steps. Once you have a path and some education, then this thing called hope goes out the window because you are more confident.

I can tell you something from experience. You can work real hard for a long time and it will still take a while for the money to come. No one wants to hear that, but it’s the truth.

Why are you poor? If you say it’s due to a lack of money, I am going to disagree with you. Once you begin to control money, then money does not control you anymore. It frees you up to do so many things.

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Sometimes you have to make a way. You might be afraid. You might be scared. You might have no clue what the next step is. But, you have to make a way.

I had a client and we’ve been going back and forth for the last ten months about eBay and Amazon. He didn’t want to do it. He refused to do it. I consider eBay and Amazon necessary evils if you’re a reseller. You virtually have no choice for certain merchandise.

So, we went back and forth and back and forth and I finally got down to the problem and why they couldn’t make it happen. I found out what this guy’s issue was. It was fear. When you’re dealing with a fear mindset, it pushes away an abundant mindset. He’s a consulting customer that does storage auctions. I said, “Dude, you’ve got to make a fucking way.”

The thing is, he is slightly illiterate. When you start doing eBay and Amazon, you’ve got to list. You’ve got to have nice product descriptions. That’s part of the deal. So, he has this huge challenge. I said, “So that’s the problem?” He said, “Yes, that’s the problem.”

Making a way does not mean you have to do it. I said, “You can get someone to do that for you.” I told him that many people in his situation have started companies and gone on to have fantastic lives because they got an advocate. So, he had to find an advocate, someone he could be brutally honest with. He had a girlfriend. She wanted to do it. He pushed her out because he did not want to admit this was a problem.

Once he got over his fear, the possibilities just opened up. He got the girlfriend to help him and an employee. He had two people doing that thing he couldn’t do. Making a way isn’t necessarily you doing it.

That’s one of the things that kills entrepreneurs. As a hustler, you have to learn how to make a way. When I was going through an extremely tough time, my mother said, “You can come home.” In 15 seconds I said, “No, I’m not coming home.” I said, “I need to figure this out, because if I come back home I may never leave again.”

I’ve seen that happen to people. It isn’t that these people are stupid or they don’t have the capability. They don’t have the mindset and the will. Understand, the difference between someone who is really successful and someone who is living on the streets is marginal. It’s mindset.

When I was going through that terrible period in my life, it took me three years to figure things out. It was one of the best things I ever did for myself. I remember how it impacted my mindset. When you are in a sorry state, all you think about is your sorry state. That’s where you have to learn to push through. It’s what I call walking through mud.

There’s days you are doing your best and it’s just not happening as fast as you want. It’s like the hands on a clock. It’s moving but when you look at it a few seconds later, it looks like it’s in the same spot. It’s like walking through mud. You’ll have days like that. Sometimes, you will have weeks like that. Sometimes, you will have months like that.

The thing is you have to keep pushing. When your back is against the wall, there is actually only one-way life can come to you. You are in the perfect vantage point to see what is coming. When your back is not against the wall, you can be attacked from the back and the side. When your back is against the wall, what you need to do is right there in front of your face.

That’s why a lot of people who are faced with a crisis excel and perform like never before. Simply put, the unimportant stuff of life was removed and what’s real was laid bare. If I did not go through that horrible experience, I would not be talking to you now.

There are people under so much financial pressure now that they can’t see a better way. They are thinking about how they will make it to the next day. They are worried about getting enough money to keep their cell phone from being turned off or to keep their lights on. People are facing these very real crises right now. You have to learn how to hustle and make a way.

When you are put in a situation where you’re going to do this or that or you’re going to perish, it becomes very clear what you have to do. There are people who are extremely comfortable in their misery. What I mean by that is, they have TV, a car and a nice place to live, but in the pit of their stomach, they’re unhappy. But, they don’t want to trade comfortable misery for pure discomfort.

That period I went through. It was hell. I was uncomfortable in the day. I was uncomfortable at night, there was no place I could go and find any comfort. I had to either leave that space or accept where I was. A lot of people say you have to turn lemons into lemonade. I don’t’ actually believe in that.

I believe in throwing out the lemons and creating some strawberry pie that you want. You have that option. We have a bunch of people literally waiting on permission to be successful. Some people have been in the same place for 10 or 20 years because they haven’t developed the right mindset.

When I was going through that stuff, I got a job by creating a way. I created a situation that opened up a new world for me. I was able to meet people and learn new things. I saw life on a different level.

As a hustler, you have to put it in your mind that you can make a way. There are no options. That is all about your mindset. Sometimes you have to get out of your own way.

I want you to have a life of abundance. It’s possible even in the matrix. There are several levels for you to occupy that are far from the bottom. That’s how the system is designed. The system is so big. It’s like a building. That building is so big that there are places you can hide and build another city. That’s what it’s like in the matrix.

You can create your own opportunities. You can make a way.

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There was an interesting Facebook conversation that was going on. It was about this movie named, Dead. Essentially, it is an apocalyptic type deal where the world goes to hell and they’re having these tribunals where you stand up and present your case why you should live or die.

There was this thing where this guy stood up and said “I am a published,” and then bam. Even before he got the word “poet” out, he got shot. I loved the conversation because we may not be going to science fiction level doom and gloom, but economically there are many people in similar situations. They may not be shot with a gun or stabbed or set on fire; however, it’s the same thing.

You step up to the tribunal looking for a job and they put the gun to your head and say, “No.” With no money, you’re dead. There’s this guy, his name is Andrew McAfee. He’s a professor at MIT. He and his partner do research on work. They were on 60 minutes and I followed the guy for a while. We’re heading into a situation where we aren’t going to need as many people to do things because of automation and the efficiencies created by technology.

This YouTube channel which I don’t take for granted, there’s over 1000 videos on this channel. I calculated the cost going back ten years. For me to do what I’ve done for sweat equity and roughly about $10,000 or maybe $15,000 for everything, including the music and the thumbnails I bought would have cost me $1.5 million if it weren’t for YouTube.

I want you to think about that. Ten years in the span of mankind is not a long time. If you’re a kid, ten years is forever. If you’re 60, ten years goes by in a flash. But, it is not a long time.

What’s happening with technology is the advancements are snowballing at a faster rate to the point where industries are created and billionaires are made and the business model is over in four to eight years. That is where we are. So, if you are going to the job tribunal, many people are finding out they are putting that economic gun to their head and going “Bam.” It’s increasing.

I talk to a lot of people and hear a lot of stories. I am a member of probably 35 Facebook groups. I’m very active in about 15. Day after day I see things that the average person doesn’t see. A lot of people are living in a bubble and they don’t know this stuff.

I’m seeing more and more people economically displaced. I’m seeing people shot during the economic apocalypse. Things aren’t as bad as they were in 2006 to 2012. It’s compartmentalized. For some people, it’s worse now than it was back then.

Some segments of the economy are booming. There are people in other segments of the economy who used to do well who are damned near bankrupt or about to lose their home. You’ve got to understand, hard work in the wrong area is a waste of time.

Many people can’t accept the party is over and some things are not coming back ever, ever again. Let’s just say you are going to the economic tribunal today. They are going to ask you what skills you have that will contribute to the economy. Ask yourself, if we got to that point, would you be one of the people still living or would you be one of the people shot in the head.

If you’re in that apocalypse world, resources are limited. You can’t waste resources on people who are not contributing. Now there is a modern-day parallel going on with that last statement, if you really think about it. Every time I say something like that I get accused of being a Republican.

My personal view is this. Both parties are fucking all of us. A lot of these people are friends and in cahoots.

Let’s go back to this apocalyptic scenario. Say you’re the chief of the village and there’s about 500 people in the village. These 500 people have to make the clothes and make the food. You’re the chief because you have certain skills. You know how to make bullets and you know how to kill animals and protect the village. You’re a very powerful dude because you’re a producer. Because you can produce something necessary, you have become rich in a barren world.

That same opportunity for the chief of the village exists for you today. Ask yourself, what can you bring to the table to keep your ass from being shot. It is really interesting because I’m an online guy now. In five years, I’ve made most of my income online.

The more you produce, the more money you can make. I produce a lot of stuff that doesn’t work. I put up webinars that fall flat. I put up videos that people don’t like.

What I’m telling you as you develop yourself, start doing more. Start putting more stuff out in the world because I didn’t know I could do this stuff. I didn’t know I could write books. It was all an experiment. Start doing stuff.

If you have this notion in your head of something you want to start. Do it. Try it. Even if you fail, you win.

One of the biggest barriers for people starting a business is fear. It’s not money. It’s not a lack of education. It’s fear.

The second barrier is too many financial barriers to free your time. Time is your most important resource to do something different.

I live simple for a reason. It gives me the time to do something. In 2012, I switched up my business model. I hired an assistant that came onsite every day and was doing a lot of social media. She came in six months straight. That was probably my worst year of doing this. The last part of the year, I was living on savings. I made a lot of mistakes in 2012.

The money I made in the first four months of 2012 was enough for me to live on because I did not have a lot of expenses. When you encumber yourself with stuff, it makes it very hard to start a business. So many people feel trapped like a rat. If you’re young, don’t go out and load yourself up with a ton of debt.

Start thinking about what you can do to serve your community. Don’t think about what you can do to get money. That is a different thought process. That’s a whole different level of hustling and entrepreneurship.

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The reality is when you have a business and you are trying to put stuff out, things are going to go wrong. I’ve been having issues with live streaming. I’m probably not going to do anymore live streams for a while and I’ll just make videos the regular way. What I had planned is going to take longer because I’ve got to shoot it and set it up. Life streaming is faster and easier.

Even with all of these hassles, under no circumstances will the party not go on. Also, I am wondering if this is YouTube trying to force people to work off their phone. Maybe that system is better, I don’t know. If you’re a business person and you’re hustling, you have to understand, things are going to go wrong. People are going to want stuff from you. Things are just going to fall apart sometimes.

Some people fall apart when things go wrong. That’s a problem, because success is a long-term game. I’ve had issues with the live streaming before and I figured it out. This will be solved at some point. I had the same problem at home and at the office. Last time I had the live streaming problem, it didn’t matter what I used. It was a YouTube issue.

All of these YouTube channels are on different servers. My YouTube channel is going on nine years old. Unless they’ve moved this channel to another server, I don’t really know what they’ve done. That could be a lot of issues, so who knows. The whole point is, I don’t really think it’s me per se.

This is one of the big things with getting your business started. You’ve got your idea. You’ve got your products. You know your audience. You’re ready to go. Then you inevitably run into problems that keep you from going forward. So many people who started multi-million-dollar business, the first two years they experienced one setback after another.

People quit on them. Folks didn’t show up. People stole inventory. People with experience know that is part of business. Starting a business takes mental toughness. You have to have the intestinal fortitude to keep going.

I mean you’ve got people out here who are fighting for their lives, battling cancer or some debilitating disease. I’ll tell you one of the reasons it’s easier for me to have a positive attitude in the face of adversity. A patient I used to take care of a long time ago, he was one of those holocaust victims. He had those tattoos up on his arms and stuff.

He had massive issues of cancer. He had two types of cancer. His torso was riddle with painful tumors, right. I would go in his room, and this dude would smile. I knew he was in pain. He had a certain grace about him. He was funny and he was a kind dude.

When I have a bad day, he is one of the people I think about. In comparison, my problems are not so big. You have to take your problems and put them in the right perspective and move on and do something else because this is life. It’s not going to get any easier. You have to make it better. Things just happen.

I see that starting businesses the correct way is getting harder. From a legal structural framework, they are getting stricter with LLCs. It’s very intriguing because in my opinion, the only way out if you’re born poor, is entrepreneurship. Going to college isn’t the path anymore. That whole ship has sailed.

Education is changing. In China, they are rearranging their education system. Their education has always been Stem based and tracked. They have a huge group of people who can’t think. They can conform. They can follow rules, but they can’t think creatively. In the future, societies who do not have independent thinkers or creators are going to be left behind.

In the USA, we are heading in that direction. We’re taking art and certain things out of the school systems, we’re creating partial people. We’re creating people who don’t have all the skill sets they need to be competent human beings.

I see a lot of people born into good situations that still struggle because they can’t handle or manage adversity. Little stuff can have people losing it. Things like when your cell phone stops working or the gate to your community is not working properly. Those types of little things can stop some people in their tracks. The problem is that people are not allowed to fail as much as they need to while growing up.

Consequences shape you as an adult. I’ll give you a really good example. When I was a kid, boys would get in fights. That was normal. When I say fights, I’m not talking about gang banging. Back then, nobody would go home to get a gun. So, you’d get in a fight and usually it would last two minutes, if that. Once you get tired, it’s over. You wither won or you got your ass kicked. That was it.

As dudes we learned, it’s not a good idea to punch that guy that’s a foot taller than you and about 50 pounds heavier. Let’s go to girls. Girls don’t get that. They don’t usually have consequences.

The problem is we have a group of people who don’t think deplorable behavior should be met with deplorable behavior. Somehow, they think they’re special. These people don’t know how to deal with diversity.

Look for the book, How Children Succeed. There are colored pencils on the cover. It’s on Amazon. It’s there. It talks about how when children have adversity early in life, it makes them stronger for the future. For the parents out there who are trying to keep their kids from failing or who are helicoptering, you could be creating an underperforming adult.

What I see with people is a very low threshold for frustration. People quit very quickly. Then they say stuff like God didn’t want me to have this. God was not really involved in that. That was a person decision you made.

Businesses are failing faster than ever before. Typically, in the past when a business was well established, it would fail at the 30, 40 or 50-year mark because of new innovations or the people who started it weren’t around anymore. It would be stuff like that.

Now businesses are failing much faster and I know why. We have created disposable businesses. We have people out there who have created a business so they can sell it, which means there is no long-range planning. The business plan is about attracting attention and getting the business to a certain level so it is positioned to be sold. It is not about serving people. It is not about building something to leave their kids. It’s none of that.

If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to prepare yourself mentally for the rigors of success. The more successful you are and the more money you make, the more challenges you are going to have to endure. The idea of the more money you have, the more problems is true. As an entrepreneur, at least the drama is your choosing versus drama that is thrust on you by somebody else. You have to be strong. It’s all about your mindset.

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For beginners trying to decide what they should do, it is hard because there is so much noise out here. There are a lot of people giving advice on their channel who come across so well and it is easy to believe in them and take their advice. The problem is you don’t know their backstory or about their affiliations. So, when you don’t get the same results, you don’t understand why. Some internet marketers get business through joint ventures.

What happens is you’ll take their course with the belief that they made their money that way and it’s not the case. They aren’t lying. They are just leaving out some very important steps. A lot of people are getting lost because they don’t understand this. People are getting partial information. People don’t know who to trust.

One of the reasons I redid the channel is because it was going to break on its own because of these new YouTube policies and procedures and algorithms are rough. If you’re not giving YouTube what they want, they have no use for you. Once again, all third-party platforms behave the same way. They have to. Based on that, I’m creating different channels. I’m creating new products and services for different people. This is completely new stuff.

This channel is going to be all about making money without a job. I feel the best way to do that is with a business. I’m going to bring on different guests. There’s going to be different content.

People get hung up on worrying about saturation. Stop worrying about that. If you build something great, there is always room for that business in the marketplace. A good example is a company named Elite Daily who built a website in 2012 from scratch and sold it for $50 million in 2014. You are going to get more money by making something new and different than following the well beaten path. You have to ask yourself, do you want to be okay or spectacular.

The beginners online are the group that is taken advantage of. You don’t know what you don’t know. One of the things that gets me in trouble is I’m too honest. I will tell you the truth.

If you don’t have a business, it’s going to take you two to five years to get it started. People don’t want to hear that. They want to hear about overnight success.

People want me to talk about stocks. I have a really simple investment plan. Make a lot of money and live on less than you’re making. It’s worked well for me. I know people who have earned their way to a $5, $6, $7, $10 million liquid position.

I’ve got a rule I write about in my new book that says you can never do the right thing with the wrong people. One of the reasons I revamped the channel is it was drawing a lot of the wrong people. That I was one me, so I had to spend three months revamping stuff.

I can get someone who has never heard of me come to this channel and watch 10 or 12 videos, buy a course and then kill it. Some people have been here three, four or five years who won’t buy anything and plan instead to keep getting my free information. The people who spend $100, $200 or $2000 on a course are going to be a lot further along in three to six months than you are in three or four years waiting for the free information.

Let’s talk about risk. Risk is taking an educated gamble and you don’t know if it’s going to work out. That’s risk. You have low risk and you have high risk.

You shouldn’t quit your job until it is costing you money. I never tell people to quit their job. You need to build a scalable side hustle to make some money, until you can leverage it into something much bigger later on.

You can start that small business now that might makes maybe $60 to $100K and then take that experience and start something much larger. Like the guy that sold Elite Daily for $50 million. He didn’t just start from having a job and start that, selling it two years later for $50 million. He had several businesses before that one. People don’t want to hear that. They want to hit that home run first.

One of the things I’ve come to understand is that everything isn’t for everybody. If you find this channel, then it was meant for you. You showed up.

Lok how I got into this. It was 2009. I didn’t know what I was doing. I had my eBook. I did well. Now, one of the reasons I can sell information is I’ve had a lot of businesses. I failed a lot, so that’s one of the reasons it works.

It’s part of my goal of wanting to be in communication. This was the plan in 2009. I started this channel. My goal was to make $50K then to sell the real book to a publisher and become a world-renowned author.

When I got into it and started to hang around with writers and we started to discuss brass tacks to bricks, I found out I was making more money than they were selling one twentieth or maybe one-hundredth of the books. This is the business lesson here for somebody who wants to write a book. If you want to make money and get on the speaking circuit, traditional publishing will get you there. If you want to make money from selling your book, then self-publish it.

I am very bullish on YouTube. I’m very bullish on video. I’m very bullish on digital marketing. Recently I went to a seminar and had my mind blown. There is so much out there, it is ridiculous. The people who are doing it are never coming on YouTube. They’re not giving away their secrets.

In the future, there will be the rich and the poor. There will not be any middle class. That’s where we are and it’s going to become even more pronounced in the future.

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I had some guy making comments on the channel and made me remember how I hated doing RFPs. If you don’t know what that is, it is a Request for Proposal. A lot of times that’s for the government sector jobs.

I remember one day I was in my office and the owner of the firm comes in. He drops all this stuff on my desks saying, “Hey. Here’s all these government agencies and I want you to start filling out these RFPs. If you’ve never done it, it’s involved. It’s not like you fill out one form and you’re done. You get the opportunity to potentially pitch, but with those types of deals, they go for the lowest bidder many times.

I wasn’t really interested in those jobs because there was not a lot of margin, so you had to work on volume if you could get it. I am 100% a private sector dude. I’m not interested in non-profits. I’m not interested in government jobs. I never have been. I started to think about that because once you get caught up in that, it can mess you up. I know someone who was doing really well with government grants and stuff, then once that money dried up and they had to compete in the real world, they were in trouble. Needless to say, they’re no competing.

They never learned how to compete. They never had a clue about how to make it work. They were very good at writing proposals and getting grants. That’s a specific skillset, but they just couldn’t make it. They ended up closing the firm and went bankrupt.

I’ve never had a business bankruptcy. I have not allowed myself that much risk or exposure. My last few businesses have been organically grown. I spent my own money.

Form me to you, leave that shit alone. Learn how to come out here and compete in the real world. Learn how to compete in the jungle. Learn how to compete so you have skill sets that are transferable anywhere you go in the world. If you learn how to sell, I don’t care what country you’re in, you can make it.

If you learn how to fill out a grant proposal, how many people need that skill set? When you’re putting this stuff together, you’ve got to ask yourself, is this going to serve me well in the future. Because many people are into short-term gain. They’re looking to get a quick lick. They’re looking to make some money really quick. That’s really not a long-term play.

It’s about putting out some effort. It’s about providing value for people. It’s about building something. This YouTube channel didn’t make any money for six months and I was working hard. Every day, I was doing video. When I wasn’t doing video, I was looking at video concepts. I was putting in work.

There’s this movement that says you don’t have to work that hard to be successful. I would say I believe in personal development and an upward mindset, but I also believe that if you take the two and establish a strong belief system and really condition your mind for success, you can’t help but be successful. What I’ve discovered in my life is positive mental attitude is the gateway to opening doors.

The second part is establishing reinforced beliefs. I’ll give you an example. The first time I do a $30K sale is the hardest, then it is easier to do the second $30K sale. Why? It is because I had established the belief I could sell $30K in products. For you to get to the next level, you have to sell $50k or $60K. Then you have to do it again to reestablish the belief.

This is why there are many talented people out there making $20K or $30K or $50K a year, who are never going to make $100K a year because they have not established the idea that they are capable of making that much money. Even with the skill sets and the ability, they do not have the mental toolkit to make that happen.

Money is not scarce. People who will pay you are not scare. They’re not. This week I closed two deals on the phone. One is probably going to be $20K or maybe a $30K contract. The other one, because it is a longer deal, may be $100K. Now I’ve done that before so I didn’t get scared. I knew how to handle their objections because I had been there before.

Your established and reinforced belief patterns are so powerful. This is one of the reasons I don’t mess around with government stuff and charities. That’s not to say they’re not worthy, but that’s not water I want to swim in. I don’t want to mess with it. I remember filling out those RFPs and being angry. I didn’t want to be there.

When you get out there is the rough world of sales and you start making sales, it’s better than an organism. Seriously, when you get those deals that are really tough, you build this mental repository of a belief system. There are just many people who don’t want to put in the work. Just because you do it once doesn’t mean anything.

How many folks that you follow online have been around five years. Just asked yourself that. It doesn’t mean they don’t have anything to say that isn’t good.

Right now, I am getting rid of things I don’t want to do. I don’t do affiliate marketing, I don’t know anything about it. I don’t buy niche websites, I don’t know anything about them. I’m not really interested in it.

You’ve got to operate using your strengths versus trying to strengthen up your weaknesses. Your weaknesses may be way weaker than you ever thought.

I would say for you to really get started to start selling something. I’m not talking about selling online, but face to face. A good way to go is to work for a company that sells to businesses. You want to get into something where you have to talk to people and pitch them. If you get the right product, you can make a lot of money.

If you can prove you have sales ability you can get a job at places that will blow your mind. After I left Rentacrate, I did not submit any applications. People came after me. I was wooed and taken out to dinner. That comes from having proven abilities. If you want to build some skill sets, be able to actually do something and repeat the process.

One of the reasons I tell people to build a business from scratch is because you will learn important skill sets.

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People are always asking me questions about how they should invest. I am not a financial adviser, but I can tell you how I feel about that. People asked me what they should do and where they should put their money.

Let’s get into it. Should you invest in a business or pimp out your 401K? I’m going to give you my experience and invite you to take from it what you will.

When I was investing heavily, I noticed something. I was doing really well because I was living on 50% of my income at the time. I did build up a large portfolio which I did have to liquidate to pay off a huge fucking loan. The reason my portfolio was doing so well wasn’t because it was appreciating; it was from contributions. You should really know that.

There are some people who will start investing today and have a million or two million in five years. That’s not me. I’m not comfortable with it. I lost all of my interest in the downturn. I got a little bit of it back. For me, I don’t like it.

There are some of you who are real comfortable. You want to invest your 401K. Knock yourself out. I did it. Now, I’m on a different path.

I believe in what I call the perpetual business. I’ll tell you how I got here. I’ve experienced retirement before. When I wrote my first book, many great things happened. I got to experience what a retired person feels like. In my case, I got paid every Friday, whether I did anything or not.

This went on for about two years. It didn’t matter if I put up a video. The machine was built. No matter what I did, money came in. My income appreciated at points. I knew it wasn’t going to last forever, so I made the most of it.

I was able to help people in retirement and illness so it was a good thing for me during my semi-retirement. I don’t like retirement where you just sit down and do nothing. That type of retirement isn’t for me. It may be for you, but it’s not for me.

So, back to the perpetual business. That book taught me something. I spent a lot of time on writing that book and promoting it. That’s why I say I’m cool with life being unfair. It’s amazing that it is unfair. The fact that I wrote and sold my book and was making a livable income in 11 months is not fair. It’s wonderful, but it’s not fair. For me to put in literally six months of work and do some other stuff and create this machine that gives me money for years is not fair.

That’s why I say, “Fuck fair.” I don’t care about fair. I don’t dwell on it. If life was fair, that would not have happened to me on the positive side.

I can do this shit until I’m 80, 100, or 105. Shoot, maybe I’ll have a bionic heart. Whatever.

I plan on working the rest of my life because I choose my work. I choose what I get to do. I choose where I work. I recently turned down a contract with a fool. He offered me $10,000. I said keep your money.

Those in the communication industries and who are writers and create movies and art work are going to have huge opportunities. Someday soon, you’re going to have a writer that is going to write a book and become a billionaire, because of the worldwide distribution. This book is going to go everywhere. Creative people are going to do well in the future. That’s coming. It’s going to be in our lifetime. I have a shot at that, or being part of it. That’s one of the reasons I left resell.

The first few years of building a business are often rocky. It’s just a matter of pushing through it. It’s amazing the changes that are going to happen. You can take $500 and flip your way to six figures in resell. If you try to do that in the stock market with the same amount of money, it will take eight or maybe ten times as long, maybe even 20.

Let’s get into investing in a 401K or starting a business. If you don’t have a lot of “get up and go,” then go ahead and invest in a 401K. It’s better to have something than nothing. If you’re not rough, ready and rugged starting your business then you’re better off following that traditional path because you don’t have what it takes.

I’ve had a lot of students. Based on their questions, I can just kind of tell where they will end up. People often ask the wrong questions.

What I’m learning to do is to take small teams of people and work out all the business kinks as I grow a perpetual business. I want to work with committed people who want to do something and provide a really awesome service or product.

Personally, I was put in a position where I had to hustle or die. When I say hustle, I’m not talking about selling drugs or anything. When I say I had to hustle or literally perish, I did not want to be living in some hovel working some job I hated and just making enough money to exist every day. To me, that’s death.

That’s where I would have been if I didn’t hustle. I would have eaten. I would have had a place to stay. I probably would have met somebody and got married and had one of those lives I would have been unsatisfied with.

If you know you’re going to go the 401K route, be sure to go with a no-load plan. If you don’t, you can lose 60% to 70% of your gains. You’re never going to get ahead that way. Your broker will tell you one thing and the forms will say another. You’ll get better information on YouTube and in the forums from other investors, because they’re doing it and they’re winning.

Some of the richest people I know don’t have any stocks or bonds. Zilch. That’s another fallacy. A had a business owner reach out to me, asking what he should do with the three million dollars he had after selling his business. I told him what happened to me. I told him to buy an apartment building in the best part of town. He did it and it worked out well for him.

I can tell you from experience, the first years of a new business are usually a mother fucker. People will lie to you. You just learn so much those first few years. If you can weather that and stick to it, you will make money.

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